One thing that bugs me about newspapers: a failure to connect today's events to yesterday...

The joke is that newspapers are the first draft of history. And each day, a newspaper prints fresh, as the lyrics in the song "Goodbye" by the Psychedelic Furs make clear:

today's news is yesterday's news
you don't remember you forget
that's the way the stories all go.

That's how I feel about Jay Mathews' column in today's paper, "6 Lessons From Montgomery County Public Schools That Mostly Missed the Point," which discusses a book published by the Harvard Business School, about the success of the Montgomery County Maryland Public School System in addressing what are otherwise considered to be "normal" disparities in educational attainment between children from families with household income vs. children from families with low household income.

Mathews is distressed by the 6 lessons:

- Lesson 1. Implementing a strategy of common, rigorous standards with differentiated resources and instruction can create excellence and equity for all students.
- Lesson 2. Adopting a 'value chain' approach to the K-12 continuum increases quality and provides a logical frame for strategic choices.
- Lesson 3. Blurring the lines between governance, management, staff and community increases capacity and accountability.
- Lesson 4. Creating systems and structures that change behaviors is a way to shift beliefs and leads to student learning gains.
- Lesson 5. Breaking the link between race, ethnicity, and student outcomes is difficult without confronting the effect that beliefs about race and ethnicity have on student learning.
- Lesson 6. Leading for equity matters.

asking "where are the teachers?"

He misses the point.

Teachers focus on individual students and a class. Principals on teachers and a school.

But leaders of a school system focus on building a strong system that yields success for every student, every teacher, every class, and every school.

The best teachers in the world can't really function in a dysfunctional system.

This has been discussed by Education Week, in "When 'Unequal' Is Fair Treatment," far better than it has ever been covered by the Post.

See the ideas behind Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory. Hertzberg posited that without what he calls hygeine factors--or the basic structural conditions--people won't function well in the workplace.

Newspapers exalt the individual without focusing the underlying factors that support failure or success.

So it is Mathews and the newspapers that miss the point, not the Harvard professors...

And therefore, our understandings about where to focus and why systems fail rarely improves.